We’ve just extended the early registration discount for one more week, so you now have March 31 to save up to $300 on conference fees for Where 2.0 2008 and take part in thought-provoking sessions like:

• EveryBlock: A News Feed for Your Block by Adrian Holovaty (EveryBlock)
• DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs” by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine)
• Google Maps for Mobile with My Location—Behind the Scenes by Adel Youssef (Google Inc.) and John Hanke (Google, Inc.)
• Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology: Implications for eGovernment by Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.)
• Monetizing Maps & Mashups by Greg Sterling (Sterling Market Intelligence)

Program chair Brady Forrest still has a few more intriguing ideas in the hopper for the agenda, so stay tuned.

If you’re thinking of coming to the 2008 edition of Where 2.0 in May, now’s the time to sign up. Early registration–your chance to save up to $300–ends this week. Program chair Brady Forrest has once again put together a stimulating, wide-ranging program, bringing in speakers from all over the world to discuss location issues and applications in gaming, activism, green efforts, search engines, history, crowd behavior, and much more. New this year also is a full day of tutorials.

Another piece from Fritz Nelson

Some companies here at ETech are so new they don’t even have business cards yet. Jing Chen flew in a mere hour before she was expected to demo K-Factor Media’s DeveloperAnalytics at AppNite in San Diego, and it turned out to be one of the more compelling early success stories. In the not too distant future, she won’t have to be giving out slips of paper with her e-mail address instead of business cards.

Earlier this week, Victoria Barret posted this article from ETech:

If you want to see the seeds of the future, check out what people with spiky hair and multicolored eyeglasses are doing. At least, that seems the lesson to be learned at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, held in San Diego earlier this month. The undercurrent here is that exceptions might be the next norm. “The essence of ETech is our idea that you often see the seeds of the future in places where people are having fun with technology,” says Timothy O’Reilly, the founder of ETech, as well as other technology shindigs, and the publishing house that carries his name. So, no shoes? No problem.

“Researchers exploring devices to enhance behavior, sensation,” writes Nathan Halverson in this article on one of the themese of ETech:

In an era where hackers are modifying everything from computers to iPhones, it’s only natural they would turn their attention inward and begin hacking the human body. Technology is increasingly being used to augment human behaviors and sensations, ranging from sex and depression to trust, several scientists said this week at the Emerging Technology conference organized by Sebastopol publisher O’Reilly Media.

Check out the PD’s ETech photo gallery too.

Bill Kasdorf has posted a thoughtful article on the conference:

The recent O’Reilly Tools of Change conference (February 11-13 in New York) - whose catchy acronym, TOC, belies its focus on books - was, as advertised, all about change. (Tools, not so much.) Although there wasn’t one standout bowl-them-over demonstration or announcement like the one that captivated attendees at the inaugural TOC last year in San Jose (a book that enabled you to interact with the Web via its “print” pages), there was plenty of buzz. And that buzz frequently threatened to escalate into a rumble or a roar. Arguably more significant than any dazzling demo could be, it was the recurring theme that packed the most punch: The world of publishing is changing in fundamental ways that can be ignored but not avoided - and ignored only at serious peril to some of publishing’s most firmly established paradigms.

Wired photographer Dave Bullock came to ETech this year and shot portraits of some of the participants:

O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference brings some of the brightest minds in the online world together every year for four days of talks, panels and workshops. ETech is really about ideas and the people behind them, so we wrangled a sample of willing geniuses and made them pony up some mug shots and tell us their latest projects.

Prolific Ryan Singel has posted two more:

Hackers have long been used to cranking out code in the morning and having a working prototype by the afternoon, but have been frustrated that they can’t do the same with hardware. That’s starting to change, and fast, driven in part by robotics enthusiasts and do-it-yourself types who are utilizing a new generation of open source hardware platforms and rapid fabrication tools.

Imagine a drug that can reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects.

Rafe Needleman posted thoughts on the launch of Fire Eagle: “At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo’s geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product’s private beta.”

“Bug Labs wants to make innovating hardware as simple as innovating software,” writes Mitch Wagner. “So they created the Bug, an open source hardware design and software for building modular mobile devices.”

Developers can snap together a cell phone, camera, LCD display, GPS, accelerometer, and more to build custom tools. Software innovators have a simpler job than hardware innovators, said Peter Semmelhack, president and CEO of Bug Labs, making a presentation at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday. “The world of atoms is very different from the world of bits,” he said. Software innovators with an idea for a new application have a wealth of open source code to use, and the Internet handles distribution.

Janko Rottgers posted this article on an ETech session that peels back some of Google’s technology:

Yesterday, Google’s director of research Peter Norvig let visitors at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego look into the technology that his firm uses in search and translation functions. As Norvig put it, a lot of the time Google does not rely on complex models and theories, but simply on large amounts of data.

Ryan Singel reports on a session where ETech program chair Brady Forrest gets his iPhone hacked:

Your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cell phone’s voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think, as Pablos Holman, a hacker clad in all black, gleefully demonstrated on stage Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician.
Holman used caller ID spoofing to break into the AT&T voicemail of the organizer of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference being held this week in San Diego.

“Government-reform advocates plan in two weeks to launch a system for members of Congress to pledge to reduce the role of money in government, Lawrence Lessig said,” writes Mitch Wagner:

The Change Congress project will ask members of Congress to make three commitments: To reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees (PACs), work to ban earmarks, and support public funding for elections. Officials who take the pledge will be allowed to wear a badge — like a Creative Commons badge — indicating which of the three reforms they support, Lessig said Wednesday night at a presentation at the O’Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Bug Labs Shows News Ways to Build Gadgets writes Mary A. C. Fallon:

Adobe Systems and Yahoo!’s Brickyard will offer developers new programming tools and Web services for creating content-drive communications and location services, and start-up company Bug Labs announces a new, easier way to build electronic gadgets for niche and custom uses.
Adobe senior engineering manager Danielle Deibler invited a packed meeting room of developers at the O’Reilly Etech conference here the opportunity to apply for the pre-release, private beta of Pacificia (pacificiabeta@adobe.com), Linux-based tools to create voice plug-ins for Flash widgets and applications. Pacificia is named for a beginner’s surfing point along California’s shore a few miles south of San Franciso.

Jascha Hoffman recently profiled ETech speaker Marc Powell:

“I think of cooking as hacking,” says Californian computer programmer Marc Powell, who led a ‘Kitchen Hack Lab’ demonstration at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week.

This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Kyle Machulis’ talk about teledildonics in his “Really, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces” talk. I’ve been joking about teledildonics to my friends for many moons, only to be met with incredulous looks of “Really?”. Little did I know that teledildonics is real and here today — it may not be as polished as a lot of the gadgets out there, but if you want to have a hand in pleasuring your long distance relationship partner, there is hope today!

My second day of ETech started off with Mike Walsh’s “Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution” presentation. Mike presented a view of how young people in Asia consume media and how their experiences differ vastly from what kids in America and western Europe experience.

A panel discussion at GSP West with Ian Kennedy (MyBlogLog), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google) and David Recordon (Six Apart) on the rollout of shared activity streams as part of the latest revolution in social networks .

While at GSP West, Dan Farber interviewed Google’s David Glazer after his conference presentation:

The first wave of applications built on Google’s OpenSocial APIs is set for liftoff in the next few weeks as MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 make the final push to release their software. I spoke with David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, who told me that it’s “pizza time” for the developers, meaning they are putting in long hours to deliver the apps sooner than later.

Tom Coates took the stage at ETech in San Diego to announce the developer release of Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle is a system that brokers location information. It is designed to help users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet.

Another article from Ryan Singel in Wired:

For the past two and half years, Google employees have bet on internal company projects — a tool known as a prediction market — providing plenty of data for the company to mine to figure out how information flows internally. The result is surprisingly ironic for the internet giant.

“Re-engineered human brains could be in our future, researchers say,” notes Jon Brodkin in this article:

Your mind: it’s just another piece of hardware. Make sure you download the latest patch and upgrade to the newest operating system. That, in so many words, is the fate of humankind described by David Pescovitz, co-editor of the BoingBoing.net blog and research director with the Institute for the Future.

Mitch Wagner posted this piece on one of my favorite ETech topics, life hacking:

Gina Trapani, the queen of Internet productivity, shared her tips for getting things done at ETech 2008, spilling the beans on best practices for maximizing results and efficiency. Trapani, editor of the blog Lifehacker and a book of the same name about to go into second edition, said that her whole career stems from a presentation at ETech 2004 — one she didn’t even attend.

Another Wired article on ETech from Ryan Singel, covering a session called The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism:

It’s not the governments who censor keywords that worries Ethan Zuckerman, whose job it is to help dissidents around the world. He fears that governments will simply decide to go after the Web 2.0 tools that activists are using to publish. Increasingly dissidents in the Middle East, China and places like Belarus are turning to server-based tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal — the communication tools at hand — to get their message out, according to Zuckerman, who works for Global Voices - a group dedicated to spreading online conversation.

Nathan Halverson focused on Saul Griffith’s ETech presentation on Energy Literacy for this article in our hometown newspaper:

Saul Griffith drives a hybrid car and thought he was practicing a sustainable lifestyle at his home in San Francisco. But then he decided to calculate his carbon footprint, a measurement of greenhouse gases generated to support his lifestyle. He was distraught to discover how unsustainable his life was.

“My head hurts from a full day of geeky wonkery in San Diego, at O’Reilly Media’s overlapping conferences, Graphing Social Patterns West and its ETech or Emerging Technology Conference,” writes Kara Swisher. Her article includes a video she shot during the conferences featuring GSP program chair Dave McClure and O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly.

“Conference in S.D. all about the future,” writes San Diego local reporter Jonathan Sidener in this ETech overview.”At the seventh annual ETech, there’s less worry about what sticks to the wall and more focus on having something cool to throw.”

This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Ethan Zuckermann’s presentation on the “Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism”, which opened my eyes to a side of Web 2.0 technologies I’d never seen before. Ethan started his presentation with this thesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.

If there is no porn, the tool does not work.

If there are no activists, it doesn’t work well.

Veronica Belmont roams the hallways at ETech to hear what attendees think is the most interesting emerging technology being discussed at the conference.

Cory Doctorow posts about a session he attended at ETech:

I just attended Elan Lee’s presentation “Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age,” a talk on Alternate Reality Game design at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. Lee helped invent the genre of ARGs — working on AI, I Love Bees, Tombstone Poker, and the other defining moments in its history.

Writes Ryan Singel on Wired, “Saul Griffith, the founder of the legendary geek innovation workshop known as Squid Labs, has crunched the global warming numbers and they are grim.”

Fritz Nelson reports and shoots from ETech, including some footage from GSP’s AppNite and Tim O’Reilly’s keynote presentation:

O’Reilly’s ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference features a smaller conference called Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) which dives deeply into the social networking phenomenon. GSP runs straight through to AppNite, a demo contest for developers. AppNite featured both educational and silly games, but a few gems emerged, both on the purely personal side and the business side.

ETech and GSP West sponsor Yahoo! is participating in both conferences in a number of ways, as this post points out. They’ve already posted video of Ian Kennedy’s presentation announcing MyBlogLog’s APIs at GSP.

Its time for my favorite conference of the year! ETech kicked off this morning to some awesome keynotes and moved straight into some killer sessions. The first session I attended was Peter Norvig’s “How billions of examples lead to better models of images and text” presentation.

Before I tell you about what Peter shared with us, its important to mention that Peter works for Google and thus has access to massive amounts of data and images that most of us can’t even conceive. And having access to these vast data stores is the premise for his presentation.

Sean Ammirati summarizes the ten AppNite entries: “The first six applications were Facebook Apps and the last four were Open Social applications.”

(Here’s a similar post on Digital Podcast.)

GSP speaker Jeremiah Owyang posted some thoughts on the Facebook discussions here at GSP: “Most of the presentations this morning have been very developer focused, I’m covering Graphing Social from the Web Strategists’ perspective: Web decision makers in corporate.”

Graeme Thickins has started posting about his conversations and impressions from GSP West and ETech.

Janko Rottgers posted a preview of ETech:

The seventh O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference opened on Monday evening in San Diego, California. The motto for this year’s conference is “Question Perspective” and the conference, which runs until Thursday, aims to illuminate technical innovations and the new insights that arise from them. The programme includes speeches and presentations from productivity guru Timothy Ferriss, editor in chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson and blogger Violet Blue.